Keeping the Faith

In three sermons, Cairo’s preachers negotiate the crackdown.

On the first Friday after the bloodiest week in recent Egyptian history, when eight hundred people died in political violence, the preacher at the Aziz Bellah Mosque gave a sermon about patience. He began by proclaiming, “I see desperation, and I smell it!” It was late August, and Sheikh Mohammed Fakeeh had never spoken before at Aziz Bellah, an influential mosque in eastern Cairo. For years, he had been campaigning for a chance to preach to a large congregation. He grew up in a poor farming family on the banks of the Nile, where a childhood illness left him blind. Despite the disability, he had become a brilliant student, completing a Ph.D. with highest honors from Al Azhar University, which is part of the most important Sunni institution in the Arab world. But he had yet to receive a good posting from the Ministry of Religious Endowments, the government bureau that oversees mosques in Egypt. The ministry had previously assigned the sheikh to a cramped mosque that stands directly beneath a highway overpass in central Cairo, and then it transferred him to another obscure position. The sheikh, who is thirty-one years old, believed that he had been disrespected because he is blind. He also felt that politics had played a role—in the past, he was thought to have been critical of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Presidential candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won Egypt’s first democratic elections, in 2012. Earlier this year, Sheikh Mohammed sent an aggrieved letter to the ministry. “I want a big mosque,” he wrote. “I have degrees and talents and qualifications. Don’t you people have any conscience? They said, ‘Mohammed, if we see you again we’ll put you in the zoo, because you’re blind.’ ” He signed the letter “Known in the ministry as The Blind Man.”

Now, on one of the worst Fridays imaginable, the ministry was finally sending Sheikh Mohammed to speak at a big mosque. He had been told of the assignment just a day earlier. The ministry had changed the Friday preachers at a number of mosques that were reputed to be sympathetic to Morsi. In early July, after millions of anti-Morsi demonstrators marched in cities all across Egypt, the military had forcibly removed him from office. Since the coup, Morsi had been held virtually incommunicado, and his supporters had staged a sit-in at the neighborhood around the Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque. Rabaa is only a few miles from the Aziz Bellah Mosque, and many members of the congregation had joined the sit-in. On August 14th, security forces brutally cleared Rabaa and the site of another sit-in, al-Nahda, killing more than six hundred people, most of them unarmed. Two days later, Morsi supporters declared a Day of Rage, and clashes with security forces resulted in more than a hundred deaths. Since then, Cairo had remained tense; there had been periodic outbreaks of violence, and the government had declared a state of emergency and instituted a strict curfew. Everybody was waiting to see what Friday would bring—it had been named the Friday of Martyrs. Another march was scheduled to leave Aziz Bellah after Sheikh Mohammed’s sermon.

From the pulpit, the sheikh talked about enduring hard times, and then he told the story of Job: “Job said, ‘I’ve had troubles, but you’re the most merciful God.’ And God answered Job’s call. God, please unite our country!” The sheikh was a big man, dressed in a snow-white galabiya, and he threw his head back proudly when he spoke. If he was nervous, his voice didn’t show it. In recent days, a few imams had been suspended, and all of them had been warned not to preach directly about politics. Certain words and phrases were regarded as off limits—“coup,” “legitimacy,” “injustice,” “military rule.” But avoiding the subject entirely was also a risk. If a sermon seemed too bland or apolitical, members of the congregation might shout down the preacher. At the al-Salam Mosque, not very far from Aziz Bellah, the crowd responded angrily to a substitute imam, and the mosque was closed the following Friday.

Aziz Bellah is one of Cairo’s most important centers of Salafism, a conservative strain of Sunni Islam. The place doesn’t appear impressive—the prayer room is cramped, with whitewashed walls and fluorescent lights. But, like many modern Egyptian mosques, it’s the outside that matters. Loudspeakers are posted nine stories high, pointing in all directions; anybody within a two-block radius can hear the sermon. Before noon every Friday, workers block the street in front, covering the asphalt with carpets the color of grass, and raise a high green awning that shades the street for fifty yards. To the side, green curtains are unfurled; in front, a long sheet of cloth creates another temporary wall, protecting the faithful from glimpsing any woman who happens to walk down the street. Every week, a couple of thousand men pray within this space, where the light has a soft green tint, filtered through the cocoon of green fabric.

Sheikh Mohammed continued with the story of Jonah. He described the prophet praying inside the whale, waiting for God’s help. “See what happens when you have patience?” he said. He called on the faithful to avoid violence, and then he prayed: “Make Egypt the country of peace and stability, quiet and stability!” When he had finished, groups of men in the congregation stood up and shouted, “Allahu akbar! ” A small crowd gathered around the sheikh, thanking him for his sermon; some of them were weeping. Soon, the protest headed down the street, the men chanting against General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who had led the coup and now seemed to be running the country:

“Sisi’s imitating Bush!”

“We’re a state, not a military camp!”

“Oh, humiliation! Oh, shame! Sisi is from the party of Bashar al-Assad!”

But there were only a few hundred marchers, a much lower turnout than the week before. Elsewhere in Egypt, the Friday of Martyrs saw a few clashes, but Cairo was peaceful—an indication that the crackdown was having an effect. Sheikh Mohammed seemed relieved when I met him later in the afternoon. “I was assigned to this sermon by my superior,” he said, through a translator. “He wanted to sacrifice me. He felt that the mosque was going to face great danger, and he wanted to show that I’m always a failure. If a fight had erupted in the mosque, then it would have been because of me. But, praise be to God, it was fine!” He grinned. “Maybe now they’ll send me somewhere good.” He joked, “Maybe they’ll give me a Christian church!” In fact, in less than a month he would be posted to a beautiful mosque in Heliopolis, his first good assignment. When asked if this was a reward for handling the tense Friday, he said that he didn’t know.

On the day of his sermon, I asked if he felt like a pawn. “Of course I fear that I’m being used,” he said. “But I used my education to deal with it. I have to be smart.” He had made his sermon general enough to please everyone—when I talked to Salafis at Aziz Bellah, they believed that the sheikh supported their cause. But he told me frankly that he liked President Hosni Mubarak, who had been overthrown during the Arab Spring, in 2011: “To me, he was like the godfather of the country.” He disliked what Morsi had done during his year in office. “Honestly, I think that all the changes they made in the Ministry of Religious Endowments were only to enable the reign of the Muslim Brotherhood, and not to improve the ministry,” he said. He told me that he didn’t know why the regular imam at Aziz Bellah had been prevented from giving the sermon. But, if the situation remained calm, perhaps he would preach next Friday. “I thank God that I’m blind, because I don’t want to see the blood pouring down the streets,” Sheikh Mohammed said. “It’s a great blessing at a time like this. But I’ve seen life; I’ve seen beauty. I’ve seen the green crops, and the trees, and the beautiful River Nile.” He tilted his head back and smiled. “I saw beautiful women when I was young. I can still see them now. I can still take everything from my memory whenever I want to see it again.”

For the past two years, many Cairenes had done their best to ignore the effects of the revolution. Otherwise, life could be exhausting in the capital, where time had a way of lurching from crisis to crisis, Friday to Friday. Every couple of months, an incident would flare up, and protests went on for weeks, with violence spiking on the first day of each weekend. Any significant crisis was bound to include a Day of Rage; there had been so many that organizers searched for new ways to brand a Friday. But, even on the worst days, the unrest tended to be localized, and life went on as usual in most parts of the capital. That was one lesson of the revolution: it could almost always be ignored.

But, with the clearing of the sit-ins, the violence reached an unprecedented level, and for the first time everybody felt the effects. People seemed on edge—twice, I saw veiled women engage in fistfights, something I had never witnessed before. One afternoon, I saw a fight in which a cabbie, his mouth bleeding, chased his Salafi fare into the entrance of the Aziz Bellah Mosque’s charitable foundation, shouting, “Fuck your mother’s religion!” After the 7 P.M. curfew, though, it was as if someone had thrown a switch. I had never been in such a silent city—on some nights in my neighborhood, it was more common to hear an Apache helicopter than a car.

The curfew was intended to prevent further sit-ins and violence, but it also forced citizens into stillness. During this period, I noticed that people seemed to speak more frankly and thoughtfully than usual. One friend told me that Egypt was still involved in the revolution, but that now it was happening “in the circular sense of the word.” The military was visible everywhere, and so were the police; people in my neighborhood said that they noticed plainclothes agents from the Amn ad-Dawla, the State Security Investigations Service, who had largely disappeared since Mubarak was overthrown. Every day, there were reports of new arrests of Muslim Brotherhood leaders, many of them being charged with inciting violence. The judicial system worked efficiently to authorize the detentions, and on August 22nd Mubarak was released to house arrest at a military hospital, after spending more than two years in prison. None of these developments had the lurching quality of the revolution—but the crackdown relied on old tactics and institutions, and seemed to proceed as much by habit as by design.

At mosques, the campaign for control was so quiet and well coördinated that most Cairenes didn’t appear to notice. The Ministry of Religious Endowments commanded that mosques be locked between prayer times, probably to prevent them from being used as a base for sit-ins. Donation boxes that might help fund Islamist groups were removed. Any religious classes and weekly lectures that were led by non-Azhar people had been cancelled, and some imams said that they had received warnings about how to perform the dua’, the supplication at the end of prayer that, when used in times of crisis, can inspire a congregation to action. But the ministry was careful not to produce documents that outlined censorship or repression, and even suspensions were vague and open-ended. One imam at an eastern Cairo mosque that’s known for having many Brotherhood supporters told me that he had been removed from his post, but he didn’t know whether he would be transferred permanently. “It’s probably because of the Ramadan lectures that we gave, where I stated, very clearly, that people support legitimacy,” he told me when we met outside the mosque. “What I heard is that they want to put their fists on the big mosques and send preachers who support the regime. They will carry out this plan until it’s stable.” He continued, “Whoever speaks about the current situation, whoever speaks the truth, they will charge him with mixing politics and religion.”

Other imams told me that such a separation is impossible in Islam. “It’s a religion and it’s also a state,” Sheikh Adel Mahmud elMaraghy, the imam at al-Nour Mosque, told me. “The Prophet was a leader of the Army, a politician, and an imam. So Islam never separated these things.” And every powerful regime in modern Egyptian history had found a way to co-opt religion. Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman military commander who assumed power in Egypt in the early eighteen-hundreds, confiscated hundreds of thousands of acres of land that belonged to Al Azhar Mosque. Like other religious institutions, the mosque had previously been funded by awqaf, or “private religious endowments,” which were part of the strong Islamic tradition of charitable giving. After Al Azhar’s funding was brought under state control, it became easier to coerce sheikhs to endorse government policies. In 1961, Gamal Abdel Nasser went a step further: he made Al Azhar part of the bureaucracy, placing it under the Ministry of Religious Endowments. Eventually, the ministry became responsible for assigning imams to all major mosques, and they were required to be Al Azhar graduates. The relationship was umbilical: Al Azhar fed graduates into the ministry, and the ministry sent imams to the mosques. The system ensured that all imams were government employees. Even the Grand Imam, the highest religious leader in Egypt, was appointed by the secular President.

During the nineteen-nineties, when Egypt suffered a wave of terrorism, Al Azhar and the ministry worked to discredit the ideas of radical Islamists. Some of this was clearly directed by the regime, but a fair amount was also based on principle—Al Azhar is known for being moderate, and has a deep theological wariness of Salafis and others influenced by Wahhabism. Under Mubarak, the longtime Minister of Religious Endowments was an Al Azhar graduate named Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq. Critics sometimes called him “the foreign sheikh”; he had studied Descartes in Europe and was married to a German Christian woman. Zaqzouq earned the hatred of Salafis by declaring that Islam forbids the niqab, the face covering for women. At one point, he said that “it creates an obstacle to people communicating.” He also said that parents shouldn’t force young girls to wear the hijab: “Children should be left to play and have fun rather than be burdened with such practices.” After the revolution, Zaqzouq was removed from office, and Morsi appointed an Al Azhar scholar with Salafi sympathies. Since the coup, he, too, has been replaced, and there are reports that the new minister, Mohamed Mukhtar Gomaa, is quietly purging all Brotherhood appointees.

From the outside, battle lines in Cairo appear to be clearly drawn, with security forces confronting the Islamists. But Islamic institutions, the military, and the police are all so omnipresent in Egyptian society that they inevitably overlap, in the same way that religion can’t be disengaged from politics. On the night of the coup, the Grand Imam of Al Azhar had stood with Sisi when he announced Morsi’s removal on national television. At the Aziz Bellah Mosque, people told me that during the Mubarak years they developed a good rapport with Amn ad-Dawla, which had to approve prominent Salafi speakers. This monitoring wasn’t necessarily heavy-handed—one person who worked at the mosque told me that the leaders used to negotiate with security forces in order to bring in a controversial preacher, in exchange for a promise that he wouldn’t say anything too inflammatory. (In the late seventies, the mosque often hosted figures associated with Gama’a al-Islamiyya, an Islamist group that went on to organize terrorist acts during the nineteen-eighties and nineties.) Since the coup, there has been a sharp increase in the number of plainclothes personnel around Aziz Bellah, and the government has many avenues of control in the mosque, which has always combined both private and public elements. The imam and a number of the other staff members are assigned by the Ministry of Religious Endowments, which pays their salaries, but some of the mosque’s operating funds are raised privately. This is a common situation, especially for mosques that are attached to major charitable foundations. Aziz Bellah is on the ground floor of the Islamic Center, which administers the mosque and a number of philanthropic activities, all of which are housed in the nine-story complex. There’s a fifty-bed hospital, as well as religious classes and social programs.

The executive manager of the Islamic Center and the mosque, Ahmed Mohammed, is a retired major general in the police force. When he took the job at the mosque, he replaced another former major general, whose predecessor was also a retired high-ranking officer. Mohammed, a talkative man of about sixty, told me that people with such backgrounds often work at big mosques, because they know how to handle security issues. But he had taken the job primarily because of his faith. When I entered his office, he was studying a transcript of a Friday sermon that had been delivered recently by an imam named Sheikh Osama Abdel Azim.

Some of Mohammed’s ideas followed religious lines, while others clearly tracked his experiences as a police officer. He told me that the removal of Morsi was wrong, but he also disapproved of the current anti-Sisi protests. “Proper Islam is to not disobey the ruler, even if he’s so bad and black that his head is like a raisin,” he said. “It was wrong to oust Mubarak; it was wrong to oust Morsi; and now it would be wrong to oust Sisi.” (He said that, even though Egypt has an interim President, Adli Mansour, and the plan is to hold elections in the coming year, for now the real power resides with Sisi.) Mohammed described Morsi as “strong, decent, honest, and fair.” But, when I asked if he would vote for Morsi or another Brotherhood member again, he shook his head. “It would be wrong to vote for them,” he said. “Not because they don’t deserve it but because of the nature of the phase we’re in.” He believed that the media had made the Brotherhood out to be polarizing. “I don’t want to increase the hatred of the people,” he told me.

During the clearing of the sit-ins, many seriously injured victims had been brought to the hospital above the mosque, and the memory sickened him. “They could have dispersed it over five or six days without killing so many,” he said of the police. But he sympathized with officers who had been commanded to shoot their fellow-citizens. When he was in the force, he said, he prayed that he would be spared such situations. “And God answered my prayers,” he told me. “He kept me away from them. I had good intentions.” He paused. “But there is some stuff that I hope God forgives us for. We were oppressed; we were forced to do it. And I made up for that many other times when I said no.”

I asked what it was that had required forgiveness, and he fell silent.

“This had to do with the fixing of elections,” he said finally.

“What did you do?”

He smiled a little sadly and said, “No comment.”

On the second Friday, the preacher at the Aziz Bellah Mosque gave a sermon about perseverance. His name was Sheikh Ahmed al-Sayyed, and he had served as imam of the mosque for the past nine years. He was six feet three, a charismatic young man who was clearly popular with his congregation. But these days he seemed wary and distracted. He wore his beard in the Salafi style, with the mustache shaved, although, when asked about it, he said that he wasn’t a Salafi. Locals told me that he participated in the Rabaa sit-in. Some also said that the police had recently spoken with the imam. Sheikh Ahmed said that he had gone to Rabaa only to watch the protests, and he claimed that he hadn’t had any direct contact with the police. A few days before the sermon, he told me that he was anxious about the way the congregation might respond. “You don’t want people to misunderstand what you are saying,” he said. “You have to be careful.”

That Friday had been named the People Reclaim the Revolution, and another protest was scheduled to leave from the mosque. The pace of arrests of Brotherhood leaders had accelerated, and included its Supreme Guide, who had never been arrested under Mubarak. On Wednesday, the police detained sixty Brotherhood members and their relatives. A number of journalists had also been held; some saw this as a sign that the crackdown was broadening. On Thursday, the Interior Ministry released a statement warning protesters that the police would respond to any violence with live ammunition.

After the opening prayer, Sheikh Ahmed warned the congregation about discord. “The danger is that divisions can affect religion,” he said. He talked about a story in the Koran, in which the pressure of conflict had challenged people’s faith. “Fleeing from battle is one of the worst sins,” he went on. “The faithful ones remain steadfast.” And then he told a story from the Hadith: Long ago, a boy of faith healed a blind man, and the boy was called before the king, who believed himself to be God. When the boy refused to deny Allah, the king tried to have him killed; twice, he was saved by divine intervention. Finally, the boy told the king that he would succeed only if he gathered all his citizens as witnesses, declared bismillah rab al-gholam—“in the name of Allah, the God of this boy”—and fired an arrow.

“He shot the boy in the cheek!” Sheikh Ahmed said dramatically. He had a deep, resonant voice, and from the loudspeakers it echoed out over the neighborhood. “The boy put his hand on the arrow and died. The people said, ‘We believe in the God of this boy!’ And the king’s advisers said, ‘This is what you feared: the people now believe in the God of the boy!’ ” At the end of the sermon, Sheikh Ahmed delivered the dua’ supplication. “We ask God to remove this grief from Egypt!” He continued, “God, give us the victory you promised.”

After the service, the sheikh stood on the sidewalk in front of the mosque, watching protesters gather. They carried a banner that read, “The Mosque of the Revolution,” and some called out to the sheikh to join them. But, after watching them march off, he turned and walked home. He left Cairo for a day, and later that week, as I talked with him in the mosque, a member of the congregation approached.

“We worried about you yesterday when you didn’t come,” the man said.

“I was in the village,” the sheikh answered.

“I thought those dogs, those sons of dogs, did something to you!”

The sheikh didn’t respond; he seemed uncomfortable when people spoke so directly about the regime. I asked Sheikh Ahmed why he had told the story of the boy and the king. “Because at this time some people could be harmed because of their faith,” he said. “If a man has a beard, or a woman wears a niqab, or somebody is leaving a mosque, they could be attacked.” I remarked that it was very different from the previous week’s sermon, which had focussed entirely on patience. In contrast, Sheikh Ahmed had described the faithful responding peacefully to oppression. “The powerful people who use violence do not prevail,” he told me. “A young boy with faith is the one who wins in the end.”

I mentioned the new security climate in the mosques, and asked if it was getting better or worse. “Personally, I fear that we are just at the beginning of this phase,” he said.

Outside the mosque, private stalls sell clothing and religious items, and one of the venders, Hassan Ahmed, told me that he had seen security personnel recording Sheikh Ahmed’s sermon. He liked the story about the boy and the king. “Sheikh Ahmed spoke about this because he wanted security to hear something directly from him, and, at the same time, he wanted to speak to us in an indirect way,” Hassan Ahmed told me. Everybody knew who the king in the story really was. “The stupidity of Sisi is that, by killing the protesters in Rabaa and Nahda, he thinks he is destroying Islam,” he said. “But the religious people only oppose him more.”

The vender had the stern gaze that is characteristic of Salafis, and he wore his beard full. He had joined Friday’s protest, but he was also critical of the Muslim Brotherhood. “They are not as committed to religion as they should be,” he said. “They weren’t really skilled enough to run this country.” He told me that, in 2007, during one of Mubarak’s anti-extremist campaigns, he was detained and tortured. Amn ad-Dawla had picked him up because his business cards said “Abu Jihad”—Father of Jihad. In fact, Jihad was his daughter’s name; in Egypt, it’s common for adults to choose nicknames that refer to their children. The vender also had a son named Osama. Both names had been of great interest to Amn ad-Dawla. Hassan Ahmed had two wives and seven children, and he told me to quote him by name; he insisted that he didn’t fear Sisi or anybody else. But he wasn’t carrying those business cards anymore.

During this period, I visited many large Cairo mosques, especially the ones that are known to be conservative, and I was surprised to find that most of them are led by imams in their thirties. I was told that this is a new dynamic, with more young people becoming imams in recent years. Youth seemed to be one reason for the range of opinions—I met some imams who were staunchly pro-Morsi; others maintained that the Brotherhood is a terrorist organization. It was impossible to identify a trend, and I sensed that, despite all the attempts to institutionalize religion, the personal aspect of faith makes it resistant to control. All were Sunni Muslims, graduates of Al Azhar, and employees of a single government ministry—but they had responded to the coup in different ways. I couldn’t think of another Egyptian institution that exhibited such a range of opinion at this time.

There are a hundred thousand mosques registered with the state, but there are also many small mosques that are not controlled by the government. The smallest are known as zawaya, or “corner mosques,” and they number roughly twenty thousand. Zawaya are privately funded and rarely receive a government-sanctioned imam; many of them don’t give Friday sermons. But sometimes they have provided a platform for non-Azhar sheikhs—often Salafis—to give lectures or classes. In early September, the ministry issued new guidelines banning unlicensed imams—an estimated fifty-five thousand—from preaching in mosques. But it was unclear how these rules would be enforced, considering that even the most prominent and heavily monitored mosques showed signs of resistance. Sheikh Adel Mahmud elMaraghy, the imam at al-Nour Mosque, one of the largest in Cairo, was given a transfer notice, but he successfully fought it by addressing the Egyptian media. The ministry backed down, allowing him to stay.

He told me that he opposed the coup, and that he would be arrested if he described the clearing of the sit-ins as “a Holocaust.” He was thirty-six but looked younger, a clean-shaven man who had studied at Al Azhar and also in the Netherlands. Although he criticized the coup and the crackdown, he was even angrier about the Brotherhood. “The Brotherhood has a sort of selfishness, a need to grab everything,” he told me. “Their greed made them want to take over the Parliament, the cabinet, all the governorates, the ministries.” He said that such behavior contradicts Islamic traditions, and I asked if it had damaged the faith. “No doubt,” he said. “They defamed Islam a great deal, and they moved people away from belief. As an Azhar man, I used to have Brotherhood friends, but I stopped talking to them because of the way they ruled.” He continued, “The Brotherhood made enemies of the judges, the media, the feloul ”—remnants of the Mubarak regime—“the police, the Army. All institutions in the country became anti-Brotherhood. Their failure in politics is the reason all of this happened.”

Like other imams, Sheikh Adel was also critical of the media, which have been rabidly pro-military in the wake of the coup, and there has been essentially no difference between the tone of the state media and that of the private press. I met with Ahmed Ragab, the chief of investigative reporting at Al-Masry Al-Youm, one of the country’s most important private newspapers, and he said that the press is still reacting to the manner in which a number of journalists and media figures had been threatened by Morsi’s regime. In late June, during Morsi’s last televised speech, a few days before the nationwide demonstrations, he ranted against the media. “He named journalists and the owners of newspapers and television channels,” Ragab said. “He was threatening them; he went to war against them. Television channels had received warnings that they were going to get shut down. So what happened afterward? Naturally, you can’t expect someone you threatened to treat you well. It’s wrong, and I don’t agree with it. But you have to understand it.”

Ragab said that when the Brotherhood controlled the state media it simply put its allies in high positions. Many imams had given a similar description of Morsi’s administration of the Ministry of Religious Endowments. “They weren’t trying to reform and improve institutions; they were just trying to take them over and use them for their own purposes,” Ragab said. He condemned the security forces for the way they cleared the sit-ins, but he noted that the Morsi supporters could not be described as nonviolent. Before the dispersal, Ragab had reported articles about citizens who had been detained and tortured at the sit-ins because they were accused of siding with the regime; one of these victims was thirteen years old. And there had been guns when the police moved in. “The Muslim Brotherhood supporters had weapons, and used them,” Ragab said.

Like so many acts of the Brotherhood, this seemed to have more to do with terrible strategic thinking than with truly violent tendencies. There was no evidence that the group sanctioned terrorism, and, for the most part, its members were nonviolent. But they had allowed weapons to accumulate at their sit-in. Even on the night of the coup, I witnessed a Morsi supporter firing an automatic weapon at Rabaa. They had also assembled groups of men who marched in formation around the sit-in, wearing helmets and carrying clubs; this had no real security value, but it gave the impression that there was an organized militia. They hadn’t possessed many weapons, but even the presence of scattered gunmen had been enough to justify the crackdown in the eyes of most Egyptians, who didn’t expect much from their police in terms of restraint. This was similar to the Brotherhood’s approach to government institutions: it acted with just enough aggression to provoke an outsized response.

By the end of August, hundreds of Brotherhood members had been arrested, including virtually all of its national leaders. The organization is deeply hierarchical, and, in the past, it has had trouble finding direction when the top no longer functions. But all Brotherhood members also belong to cells called usra, or “family,” which have traditionally made it possible for the organization to survive oppression. “We have many parallel systems that can work efficiently in this situation,” Tarek el Morsy, a spokesman for the Freedom and Justice Party, the Brotherhood’s political wing, told me. “And don’t forget that the Brotherhood was often under pressure from the dictatorship, in the time of Abdel Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak.” But I sensed that now we are witnessing something different. For the first time in history, the Brotherhood actually held power, and for most Egyptians it had proved its incompetence. In the process, it also lost religious credibility, which was among the main reasons that it had won elections. Today, there seems to be a growing tendency to separate the organization from the faith: many people criticize the Brotherhood’s interpretation of Islam, emphasizing that it is primarily a political group. At mosques, even staunch opponents of the coup told me that they wouldn’t vote for the Brotherhood again. “They care more about politics than about da’wa, calling people to Islam,” Sheikh Adel, the imam at al-Nour Mosque, told me.

Last week, a Cairo court ruled that the Brotherhood should be dissolved, with the ban including its nonpolitical activities. Even if the verdict is successfully appealed, it’s unlikely that the group will return to political prominence during this critical moment in Egyptian history. Its rise and collapse has the quality of a fable: after nearly six decades as an illegal organization, the Brotherhood won every election in post-Mubarak Egypt; then, in the span of a year, it lost everything. But much of its success had actually been a mirage. Few voters had been truly enthusiastic about the Brotherhood—its victories had more to do with a lack of alternatives in a society without many organized political groups. And elected office has little immediate impact in a country whose institutions are so entrenched: there are more than five million government employees, two million men in uniform, and fifty thousand state-funded imams. The Brotherhood’s membership is probably only half a million, and it lacked the political skill necessary to win allies in state entities, even those that included fellow-Islamists.

In the streets, the protest movement is also disengaging from the Brotherhood. Since the middle of August, signs and symbols have changed, with pictures of Morsi and the Brotherhood’s logo disappearing. The new rallying cry is Rabaa—people hold yellow signs with an icon of a four-fingered salute, because Rabaa sounds like the Arabic word for “fourth.” Marches are organized by a new group that calls itself the National Alliance to Support Legitimacy. When I met with Omar M. Azzam, one of the founders, he said that he was not a member of the Brotherhood, and that the alliance included a number of Islamist groups. He told me that they were planning protests for the third Friday after the week of the massacres, which would be named the People Protect the Revolution. His organization is willing to negotiate with the government, but he acknowledged that this is difficult, “with the military boot on our neck.” And, for people who lost loved ones, the pain is still too deep. “For them, it’s not a deal on the table, a situation where you take something and I take something,” Azzam told me. “The problem is that these people have certain expectations. They are thinking only about what they’ve lost.”

On the third Friday, the preacher at the Aziz Bellah Mosque delivered a sermon about forgiveness and reconciliation. Sheikh Abdullah Shaker is a prominent scholar who often speaks at Aziz Bellah; he’s a Salafi, but within that school he’s considered to be moderate. He began by asking for God’s forgiveness, and he warned the members of the congregation that they were under observation. “You have to be aware that God knows everything!” the sheikh said. “He knows what’s inside your chest!”

In early August, Sheikh Abdullah had been one of a few moderate Salafi leaders who met with Sisi. At the time, the government had been threatening to clear the sit-ins, and the Salafis hoped to find a peaceful resolution. After the meeting, Egyptian newspapers reported that Sisi had promised not to use violence. Some Islamists had criticized Sheikh Abdullah for agreeing to meet with an illegitimate ruler. Since the massacres, the sheikh had kept a low profile, and had never made public statements about the encounter with Sisi. His sermon avoided the subject entirely. There were no stories, no characters; the topics were completely abstract. At times, the subject matter was so removed from contemporary politics that I wondered if it might be some elaborate allegory about the relationship between the citizen and the state. “Be kind to your parents!” the sheikh proclaimed, and then he transitioned to the abattoir. “If you slaughter an animal, be decent to the animal!” he said. “The butcher should not show the animal the knife, so as not to disturb the mental state of the animal.”

The previous morning, there had been an assassination attempt on the Minister of the Interior, who oversees the security forces. He had been riding in a convoy in eastern Cairo when somebody detonated a bomb; the minister was unharmed, but more than twenty people were injured, one of whom died. An Islamist group called the Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis claimed responsibility for the attack three days later. Not much is known about the organization, apart from the fact that it is based in Sinai, which has seen an increase in attacks on security forces since Morsi’s ouster. The week of Sheikh Abdullah’s sermon, the government continued to extend its crackdown, with a court order closing down four television stations, including one belonging to Al Jazeera.

In Cairo, despite all the terrible things that have happened, most people I spoke with claimed to be optimistic. The majority in the capital supported the coup, but even opponents say that they are hopeful. “Our religion teaches us optimism,” Sheikh Hassan Abdel Aziz, one of the imams who had got in to trouble for speaking frankly, explained to me. Like many others, he said that people’s expectations of freedom have been fundamentally altered by the Arab Spring. And it’s true that the experience of talking with Egyptians is almost always reassuring, because it’s hard to imagine them being totally silenced. But a conversation with an individual is very different from observing how that person behaves within an entrenched institution. A good cop might help fix an election, and an upright imam might say something that he doesn’t believe—such compromises have always been part of the larger system. The revolution has changed the way many people think, but it has yet to inspire the reform of key organizations and bureaucracies. Hussein Hammouda, who served in the Amn ad-Dawla for twenty-five years under Mubarak, and was expelled in 2008 for protesting the torture of Islamists, told me that the security forces haven’t been restructured. He also said that he was optimistic, but he admitted that, for those in power, there’s a temptation to maintain flawed institutions and to use them as tools of repression. “If Morsi expelled somebody from a ministry because he was not Muslim Brotherhood, then when the Muslim Brotherhood goes out the new regime comes and expels those people,” he said. “It’s revenge justice. It’s not transitional justice.”

In his Friday sermon, Sheikh Abdullah skirted all the current events. Near the end, when he finally referred more directly to the crisis, his message was personal rather than political: he called out to the congregation to seek forgiveness and to change their ways. “God tests his people with a crisis,” he said. “God in his Book says he will not change what’s wrong with some people until they start to change it themselves.” After the final prayer, only a few hundred protesters gathered in front of the mosque; the People Protect the Revolution hadn’t attracted much support. The following Friday, even fewer gathered under the banner of “Loyalty to the Martyrs’ Blood.” With every week, the Friday names grew more abstract, and the Day of Rage became more distant.

Inside Aziz Bellah, people gathered around Sheikh Abdullah. He was nearly sixty years old, with a long white beard and silver-rimmed glasses; a white cloth draped his head. He seemed eager to escape; even when he smiled and greeted the well-wishers, his hooded eyes flitted toward the door. He told me that he hoped his sermon helped people to stay calm and nonviolent. I asked him which party was most responsible for the violence that had consumed Cairo all summer.

“The Devil,” he said. “There’s no doubt the Devil has something to do with it.”

He headed toward the door. I asked him what he thought of the country’s direction, and he hesitated. “The government is actively working toward the right path,” he said quietly. And then he exited the mosque and turned left, away from the march. ♦